Dagorlad, the man behind One Ring, is working for quite a while on a really outstanding gaming table: Jurassic Reich. I followed his efforts for quite a while and now he has finished the gaming table. What I really love about the table is that Dagorlad really managed to understand german medival architecture and bring this to live in his model. The castle, or german Burg, is beautiful and moreover looks exacly like in all those war movies with castles and Nazis. For sure the board could be used for historical wargaming, too. I really like the design of the board, the position of the castle is very skilfully chosen, still there is much space to play on.
Blog
Commenting on Stu´s Portees
Stu´s 6 Pdr Portee Way back to 2005 Stu, a wargamer in New Zealand, started to paint his Portees. During that time is was painting a Commonwealth Flames of War force, too and I visited his great page on a regular basis. I really like Stu´s stuff and his opinion on our hobby. However a reason for me writing this comment on this blog is the fact, that I switched Unfinished armies to WordPress in order to communicate better with other hobby guys. Therefore I start with Stu, since he was one of the pioneers of wargaming blogging for me! Great, that you managed to finish those excellent Portees! New Zealanders do have cool insignia by the way!
Battlestar Galactica – The Civilian Fleet Part 1
When I first saw the television show “Battlestar Galactica” I was a little child. I loved the episodes and dreamed about reenacting the adventures of Apollo and Starbuck with miniatures. A few years ago I saw the re-imagined show and was really impressed that the series got even better than its parent.
It is now my favorite television show an last year I started searching for tabletop miniatures of Battlestar Galactica.
A few month ago I found the miniatures from Ravenstar Studios and I ordered them. When they arrived I started painting these great models. For the first steps I painted some ships of the civilian fleet of the show to get a feeling for spaceship painting. Most of the paint job was drybrushing the models in few steps and painting some highlights an details. The miniatures are very small (see the coin in the picture above) and I like how it worked. The pictures are an enlargement of the real miniatures.
For information of the ship names I used the Battlestar Wiki which is a great resource for the television shows. They have a lot of iamges of the spaceships, too, so feel free about comparing my models with the real ships.
When I finish my fleet, I want to use the models for the tabletop-game “Starmada” from Majestic Twelve Games. The game is very fast but still detailed and has a great physical movement model which is best for playing in science fiction universes like the Babylon 5 and the Battlestar Galactica universes. It has a ship build ruleset which allows to add any spaceship concept to the game. Later my friends and me want to add some playsheets for the BSG ships. In the next weeks I will write a review of the rules on this site.
Below you see a better lighted photo of the “Cloud 9″ on my gaming mat. The stand is scratch build of 2mm plasticard with a metal pin. I varied the pins in 0,5cm steps for all my ships in the fleet. There are only 2 models with the same pinlength. The base is 3.5cm long and 2cm wide. So it fills out one complete hex of the gaming mat (1.5” hexes).
In the next week more ships of the fleet will follow.
Greetings
Glorfunzel
Nimrod anti air tank
When collecting a force I especially like the models which are very typical and special for the force I paint. The hungarian army fielded some very individual models, one of them is the Nimrod, although it is an original swedish design built in licence in Hungary. However there the unique hungarian mixture is very interesting, therefore I startet with the Flak tank.
Having airbrushed the hungarian Stukas gave me the skills to airbrush these tiny tank models. They came out really excellent. I produced my own decals using decal printing paper and a color printer.
The camo scheme is typical hungarian with three colors. I used exactly those mentioned in the Flames of War publications considering the Eastern Front: Reflective Green,
Teutonic Winter War
Darrell Hindley shows us in this great article a demo game made by Gripping Beast and Comitatus Miniatures at Crisis. Very athmospheric gaming table. via darrellhindley.co.uk
WW1: 6. Bayerisches Sturmregiment
My gaming club is currently preparing for a participation game at the annual german wargaming convention Tactica in Hamburg next year. We are going to present a Great War gaming table depicting the so called Kaiserschlacht in 1918. We preparing a 28mm gaming table showing a trench which is manned by the Ulster Division and attacked by the 6th bavarian Sturmregiment.
I decided to paint miniatures and vignettes for this project. Therefore I am working on color schemes and dirt, blood and mud on the models which is not an easy thing to paint.However I think I can still add more dirt, as you can see. 6 of the models are cleen, because they were the first models to paint. The next 6 models look far more dirty. I must admit that I forgot to paint dirt on the helmets….
Images from Military Museum in Budapest
I would like to share some pictures I made in the Hungarian National Military Museum (Hadtörténeti Múzeum) in Budapest. I visit the museum on a regular basis since my wife is from Budapest and we visit this beautiful town often.
The museum is one of my favourite places there. The presentation is a little bit old fashioned, but you get quite a lot of information about all epoches of hungarian warfare. The second world war is looked at in four rooms. There are also quite bix exponates like a Heeresanklopfgerät PAK 36 with Stielgranate and a Schwimmwagen. Not many texts are translated, especially in the older exhibitions. However if you are in the topic this should not stop you.
Currently I start painting a Hungarian FoW army, so I brought back into my mind these pictures.
If you visit Budapest you can easily find the museum on the Castle Hill in Buda.
The Military Museum at Google Maps
Hungarian Stukas
Emezek vannak az új magyar Stukamak. These are my new hungarian Stukas. The Ju 87 D Models again come from armaments in miniature. This was my second attempt to paint aircraft so I made a lot of mistakes and now I know much more about how to airbrush 1:100 models.
First of all I will paint the parts separately in the future. Moreover I need to think about a way to add a handle for painting the model. I tried to mask the light blue bottom of the Stukas with liquid mask. This worked well, but to get ridd off the mask was a pain in the arse. Therefore I will use liquid mask only less complicated surfaces than the bottom of a Stuka with bombs attached.
The chosen color scheme is a kind of free style since I have no evidence of a aircraft which was spraygunned like the hungarian tanks were. It seems that a german style with edges was used for camoflage with hungarian markings.
However I wanted to have a similar look for the hungarian tanks I will paint in the near future. To be honest I am not that accurate when it comes to aircraft since in Flames of war they are mere counters. The Aircraft rules are not very attractive to me so I found a way to use them as objectives instead. Since the carrier is not retractable they can stand on the table just as they are.
I am quite happy with the bases for the aircraft since the are built from the scratch. A little hole in each Stuka and a piece of steel wire in the top of the acryl rod is a quite simple construction. I have chosen different heights and angles and I like the way the models are positioned.
Fallschirmjäger Pionier Zug
Now I am very close to have a finished army, although this blog has a different name. The Fallschirmjägerpioniere will only be followed by one complete platoon and maybe another 6 flamethrower teams. For sure there is one single option more which could be added after I model a light mortar team which is the mountain gun platoon. The values were changed in North Africa so the Fallschirmjäger artillery is now an option worth painting.
However I am very pleased with the performance of the heavy mortars. Adding another light mortar team, bearing in mind that the HQ has an option for light mortar teams too, this should be enough.
Currently I was interested in having flamethrowers in the game since my club colleges often field tanks. The anti tank rating of pioneers sound very attractive, too. If I put an opel blitz truck from the various trucks I have on the table, I have a pioneer support truck, too.
In order to differenciate between my infantry platoons I decided to paint olive jump smocks. All other platoons have Luftwaffe splinter camo painted on. It came out very nice. Koch came with this blister too. In our club heroes are not very popular since the rules are somewhat exaggerated. van der Heydte for example, the lord of the living dead, is really ridiculous. Therefore I manned his team as a command team with 3 miniatures. He has the Luftwaffe Schiffchen hat and a splinter camo jump smock. Some of the models have rank insignia of Leutnant and Oberjäger, Koch himself the Oberstleutnant rank.
I have chosen an Glider assault platoon blister for my pioneers and painted some additional teams manned out of my Bitz box. Since Glider assault teams have MG42 teams, too I added one. If I don´t need them they can be treated as mere infantry teams. Usually we agree in the club to allow such minor proxy gaming.
Doing the photos it came into my mind that the drop canister is not needed for a glider assault team. However the platoon could now be fielded as an airborne pioneer platoon, too.
Fallschirmjäger Pionier Zug
Now I am very close to have a finished army, although this blog has a different name. The Fallschirmjägerpioniere will only be followed by one complete platoon and maybe another 6 flamethrower teams. For sure there is one single option more which could be added after I model a light mortar team which is the mountain gun platoon. The values were changed in North Africa so the Fallschirmjäger artillery is now an option worth painting.However I am very pleased with the performance of the heavy mortars. Adding another light mortar team, bearing in mind that the HQ has an option for light mortar teams too, this should be enough.
Currently I was interested in having flamethrowers in the game since my club colleges often field tanks. The anti tank rating of pioneers sound very attractive, too. If I put an opel blitz truck from the various trucks I have on the table, I have a pioneer support truck, too.
In order to differenciate between my infantry platoons I decided to paint olive jump smocks. All other platoons have Luftwaffe splinter camo painted on. It came out very nice. Koch came with this blister too. In our club heroes are not very popular since the rules are somewhat exaggerated. van der Heydte for example, the lord of the living dead, is really ridiculous. Therefore I manned his team as a command team with 3 miniatures. He has the Luftwaffe Schiffchen hat and a splinter camo jump smock. Some of the models have rank insignia of Leutnant and Oberjäger, Koch himself the Oberstleutnant rank.
I have chosen an Glider assault platoon blister for my pioneers and painted some additional teams manned out of my Bitz box. Since Glider assault teams have MG42 teams, too I added one. If I don´t need them they can be treated as mere infantry teams. Usually we agree in the club to allow such minor proxy gaming.
Doing the photos it came into my mind that the drop canister is not needed for a glider assault team. However the platoon could now be fielded as an airborne pioneer platoon, too.
